By Dan Graham | Co-founder, trustee, and project leader.
It's been a busy couple of weeks since we landed back from Sudan, and the news filtering back makes us prouder every day.
Our original project proposal had to be scaled back somewhat, and in the end we trained 36 new instructors. 17 of them were male, and for the first time ever in Sudan - we had 19 female participants. Honestly, we did not really know what we were letting outselves in for; and how much of a significant step forwards we were taking.
For the first week of the training, the 17 men were taught how to become Beach Lifeguard instructors - involving rescue skills, First Aid, CPR, and importantly - risk assessment and accident prevention knowledge.
In the second week of training, the men were joined by 19 women. Together, the 36 participants were taught how to deliver the basic Aquatic Survival Programme - a series of ten simple messages targetted at children, giving them basic advice about how to behave safely around the water.
This was my fourth trip out to Sudan, and every trip is different, but the same. They are challenging, frustrating, rewarding, and absolutely humbling. The passion, excitement, and motivation demonstrated by this years participants was amazing. In particular, the females - and their drive for more knowledge and learning.
We were very very lucky with the exchange rates, and managed to get a lot more local currency than we had predicted - and so we have been able to employ a programme co-ordinator who manages the activities of the volunteers, and importantly collects the evidence of their activities. We have been able to fund the travel and subsistence expences of the volunteers; and later this year we will be rolling out the Aquatic Survival Programme through the school system.
We are now collecting reports from the participants about their on-going teaching activities. As part of the programme, we taught over 200 Sea Scouts in one day. The total number of children taught is now well over 1000 - and we are planning on hitting about 50,000 (yes fifty thousand, that's not a typo) by September.
Thank you for the support that you have given us. Your money has enabled us to deliver this training to these participants - and as you can see, a small amount of money is taking us a very very long way.
For further information, read the blog - it was updated every couple of days whilst we were out in Khartoum, and you can get a much richer flavour of what we were upto.
Links:
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